KYPRIOS/APHRODITE PROCESSED METALLIC SALT. V.I.T.R.I.O.L.
Aphrodite Urania, the pure light of the Divine Feminine
The threefold Unity, is also called the “Creative Logos”(The Word, a verb, Verbum) because the Creative Logos, as speech, only signifies the name, that is, the definition of the “specificity of things."
"In geometry, in a triangle, the given line is Mercury, the Angles are Sulphur, and the resultant triangle is Salt."
From numerous ancient sources describing the nature of natural and metallic salts, one arrives at the view that salt’s piquant effect was seen to extend beyond the sensation on the tongue.
Salts stimulates not only the appetite but desire in general. Equally, one can understand how salt, as an aphrodisiac, was connected specifically to the cult of Kypris/Aphrodite, the goddess of eternal desire par excellence.
The ancient esoteric etymology of Aphrodite as ‘brine-born’ (from aphros, ‘sea-spume’) is deeply mired not only in desire but also enmity, the twin impulses that Empedocles called ‘Love and Strife’.
Aphrodite, is born from the primordial 'patricide', the resultant of a crime of passion. Hesiod’s formulaic Theogony tells us how the goddess Gaia (Earth), the often unwilling recipient of the lustful, rape of Ouranos, the oppressive (Sky), incites their seventh child Cronus, (born of this 'unholy union') against his 'sky father'. Cronus rises against his progenitor and, with a sickle of jagged flint, severs his genitals, (the Sun) and casts the male generative power' into the surging sea, (Fire, Water). Over time, a white foam, salt (aphros) coagulates around 'them' from the immortal flesh, and in this 'proto-sulphate' a maiden grew. "Her, gods and men call Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, because she grew amid the foam." I posit the equivalent in ancient Mycenaean (Linear B) was Kyprios.
These two primordial impulses prove pivotal to the alchemical function of all salts the determiner of all affinities and aversions. And if Aphrodite is connected to salt’s as desire provoking, then her ultimate counterpart must be associated with the opposite, which is war and strife. Aphrodite is paired with Ares among the Greeks (as Venus is to Mars among the Romans), but we have to keep in mind that the origin of her cult is bound to Ancient Near Eastern. In the Cypriot language, I posit Kyprios, as her designation, the designation of the process, transmutation, metamorphosis. In her Phoenician designation Asi-tar-te, embodies not only eros/passion and love/sensuality. Egyptian texts of the early Eighteenth Dynasty saw fit to partner her with their own untamed transgressor god, Seth-Typhon, a divinity who, like Aphrodite, was associated specifically with sea-salt and sea-spume (aphros).
The Scallop Shell a great skimming tool used by Hephaestus working Metallic SALTS.
The four elemental bodies have been interpreted as lead, copper, tin and iron, (Pb, Cu, Sn, Fe), while the three sublimed vapors have been identified with sulphur, mercury and arsenic (S, Hg, As), originally (S, Cu, As). The framework in which salt is situated, is as one of the three principles (tria prima: sulphur, mercury, salt) alongside the four Empedoclean elements (tetrastoicheia: fire, air, water, earth). Here salt may be seen to replace arsenic due to its more integral relationship to sulphur and mercury in the form of cinnabar (mercuric sulphide, HgS): the salt of mercury and sulphur.
The distinct relation of salt to the body and the elements probably accounts for the cross-like sign it takes in the Greek manuscripts. These forces are necessary to the establishment of creation rather than creation per se. The process not the creation, the flow not the fixed.
Alchemy is not only about the transmutation of metals, but the shift in consciousness that returns us from the physical to the non-physical.
Throughout its history, alchemy has shown a dual nature. On the one hand, it has involved the use of chemical substances and so is claimed by the history of science as the precursor of modern chemistry. Yet at the same time, alchemy has, throughout its history, also been associated with the esoteric, spiritual beliefs of Hermeticism and thus is a proper subject for the historian of religious thought. Such an approach is complemented by the psychological studies of Carl Jung, which correlate alchemical symbolism with the development of the psycho-religious life of the individual.
Alchemy was practiced in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Persia, India, Japan, Korea and China, in Classical Greece and Rome, in the Muslim civilizations, and then in Europe up to the 19th century in a complex network of schools and philosophical systems spanning at least 4500 years.
In the history of science, alchemy refers to both an early form of the investigation of nature and an early philosophical and spiritual discipline, both combining elements of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, medicine, astrology, semiotics, mysticism, spiritualism, and art all as parts of one greater force.
Alchemy is an ancient path of spiritual purification and transformation; the expansion of consciousness and the development of insight and intuition through images
Alchemy was preceded by religion, medicine, and metallurgy. The first chemists were metallurgists. The miner and metallurgist, like the agriculturalist, simply accelerated the process, the natural maturation of the fruits of the earth, in a magico-religious relationship with nature. In primitive societies the miners and metallurgist were members of occult religious society.
The first ventures into natural philosophy, the beginnings of what is called the scientific view, also preceded alchemy. Systems of five almost identical basic elements were postulated in China, India, and Greece, according to a view in which nature comprised antagonistic, opposite forces--hot and cold, positive and negative, and male and female; i.e., primitive versions of the modern conception of energy.
Scholars generally agree that alchemy had everything to do with chemistry, but the modern Hermetic holds that chemistry was the handmaiden of alchemy, not the reverse. From this point of view the development of modern chemistry involved the abandonment of the true goal of the art.
In every philosophy as well as every spiritual tradition, we talk about basic elements that are material and energetic. Since we know that every manifested thing is a trinity of matter, energy, and Consciousness, then we understand that the basic elements are also elements of Consciousness, not just matter and energy.
The four primary elements - air, fire, water, earth - make up everything that we are, or is, on every level. The fifth element, literally “the quintessence,” relates to the ether. In Sanskrit terms, we can also say that it is Kundalini.
It is the Prakriti, the root energy that in some religions is symbolized as the feminine, the Divine Mother. The Divine Mother is that creative force or intelligence in nature and our consciousness that gives life to everything. If we want a healthy spiritual life, we need to know our Divine Mother. Her active agent is the quintessence, which is an energy in all of us. We need that energy to be active. In us, it starts as passive, latent, what in science we call "static, non-kinetic energy.
The Trinity, that is to say the Three Principles, is the basis of all reasoning, and this is why in the whole “series of genesis” it is necessary to have all [three] to establish the foundational Triad that will be[come] the particular Triad. The Three Principals include first an abstract or nourishing datum, second a datum of measure, rhythmisation and fixation, and finally, the third a datum which is concrete or fixed like a seed. This is what the hermetic philosophers have transcribed, concretely and symbolically, by Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, playing on the metallic appearance in which metallic Mercury plays the role of nutritive substance, Sulphur the coagulant of this Mercury, and Salt the fixed product of this function.
In general, everything in nature, being a formed Species, will be a Salt.
Everything that coagulates what is a nourishing substance will be Sulphur or of the nature of Sulphur. Everything that is coagulable will be Mercury, whatever its form.
The image of coagulation with Sulphur as the coagulating agent, Mercury as the coagulated substance, and Salt as the resulting form is used repeatedly by the true Alchemist Mineralogist, Metalurgist, Numerologist, Philosopher, etc. This motif is also the embryological process.
Among the various perspectives that have been surveyed on the nature and the principles inherent to salt, it is the Pythagorean statement that I turn to, which says that ‘salt is born from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’. This pertains most directly to the deeper meaning of Schwaller’s and my hermetic phenomenology. Salt is placed in a septennial relationship comprising of the tria prima and the four elements.
Eberly and Haage inform us that it was Abu Bakr Muhammad Zakariyya Ar-Razi who added the third principle of salt to the primordial alchemical principles (sulphur and mercury) inherited from Greek antiquity (implicit in the exhalation theory of metallogenesis), and already existing in Jabir’s system. This and related traditions must be recognised as clear precursors to Paracelsus’s conception of the tria prima.
Elementally, salt is situated at the end of a progression beginning with fire and air and ending in water and earth. Fire and air form a triad with sulphur; air and water form a triad with mercury; water and earth form a triad with salt. Salt at the end of this progression offers a new beginning, (Life in Death) or to a new fire/sulphur, as the octave recapitulates the primordial tonos in musical harmony.
For Schwaller, it was precisely this ‘juncture of abstract and concrete’ (fire and earth) that was identified with the formation of the philosopher’s stone, the Kyprios).
Salt is an element of substance and physicality. It starts out as coarse and impure. Through alchemical processes, salt is broken down by dissolving, it's purified and eventually reformed into pure salt, the result of the interactions between mercury and sulfur.
In the identification of both sulphur and salt as seed' (semence), one discerns a specific coherence of opposites that, in elemental terms, is described by the expression ‘Fire of the Earth’. The salt is always described as a seed (semence). This seed “becomes” seed again through the organic process of tree and fruit (growth, ferment, coagulation). It is at once a beginning and a finality (prima and ultima materia). The reality described is non-dual.
Beginning and end partake of something that is not describable by an exclusively linear causality and yet it is seen to “grow” or “develop” along a definite “line” or “path” of cause and effect, at the same time it partakes of a cyclic or self-returning character; and for Schwaller, it is the spherical spiral that provides the true image of its reality: The fixed, concrete seed-form (itself a coagulation of mercury by sulphur) contains the active sulphuric functions (the coagulating rhythms) which it will impose upon the nutritive mercurial substance (unformed matter). ‘One nature’, as a Graeco-Egyptian alchemical formula puts it, ‘acts upon itself’.
The alternate cycle of Ouroboros and in the case of cycle of Aphrodite, we have the circle vertically divided, to represent alternate still points, as 'life in death' and 'death in life' her solstices. This should clearly show that the esoteric etymology of Aphrodite as a pentagram, or an Alfa-tetragramaton is A-BR-DT. BR a consonant cluster acting upon itself designating 'life in death and DT a consonant cluster designating 'death in life'.
The key to the formation of the philosopher’s stone 'salt'.
In this configuration below one can see the hermetic “problem” of salt, i.e. its mysterium. Salt partakes of something that stands between water and fire (Pythagoras’ ‘purest sources’) in a way that is intimately related to earth, to which it imparts its dryness.
Its connection to fire is felt in the hermetic associations of the elements (the sulphuric triad, fire and air, is characterised by heat; the mercurial triad, air and water, is characterised by humidity or wetness, while the saline triad, water and earth, is characterised by coldness; however, it salt's dryness—its desiccating quality—can only come from fire. Visser’s remarks, once again, prove cogent and penetrating:
Salt, once isolated, is white and glittering. It is the opposite of wet. You win it by freeing it from water with the help of fire and the sun, and it dries out flesh. Eating salt causes thirst.
"In geometry, in a triangle, the given line is Mercury, the Angles are Sulphur, and the resultant triangle is Salt."
From numerous ancient sources describing the nature of natural and metallic salts, one arrives at the view that salt’s piquant effect was seen to extend beyond the sensation on the tongue.
Salts stimulates not only the appetite but desire in general. Equally, one can understand how salt, as an aphrodisiac, was connected specifically to the cult of Kypris/Aphrodite, the goddess of eternal desire par excellence.
The ancient esoteric etymology of Aphrodite as ‘brine-born’ (from aphros, ‘sea-spume’) is deeply mired not only in desire but also enmity, the twin impulses that Empedocles called ‘Love and Strife’.
Aphrodite, is born from the primordial 'patricide', the resultant of a crime of passion. Hesiod’s formulaic Theogony tells us how the goddess Gaia (Earth), the often unwilling recipient of the lustful, rape of Ouranos, the oppressive (Sky), incites their seventh child Cronus, (born of this 'unholy union') against his 'sky father'. Cronus rises against his progenitor and, with a sickle of jagged flint, severs his genitals, (the Sun) and casts the male generative power' into the surging sea, (Fire, Water). Over time, a white foam, salt (aphros) coagulates around 'them' from the immortal flesh, and in this 'proto-sulphate' a maiden grew. "Her, gods and men call Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, because she grew amid the foam." I posit the equivalent in ancient Mycenaean (Linear B) was Kyprios.
These two primordial impulses prove pivotal to the alchemical function of all salts the determiner of all affinities and aversions. And if Aphrodite is connected to salt’s as desire provoking, then her ultimate counterpart must be associated with the opposite, which is war and strife. Aphrodite is paired with Ares among the Greeks (as Venus is to Mars among the Romans), but we have to keep in mind that the origin of her cult is bound to Ancient Near Eastern. In the Cypriot language, I posit Kyprios, as her designation, the designation of the process, transmutation, metamorphosis. In her Phoenician designation Asi-tar-te, embodies not only eros/passion and love/sensuality. Egyptian texts of the early Eighteenth Dynasty saw fit to partner her with their own untamed transgressor god, Seth-Typhon, a divinity who, like Aphrodite, was associated specifically with sea-salt and sea-spume (aphros).
The Scallop Shell a great skimming tool used by Hephaestus working Metallic SALTS.
The four elemental bodies have been interpreted as lead, copper, tin and iron, (Pb, Cu, Sn, Fe), while the three sublimed vapors have been identified with sulphur, mercury and arsenic (S, Hg, As), originally (S, Cu, As). The framework in which salt is situated, is as one of the three principles (tria prima: sulphur, mercury, salt) alongside the four Empedoclean elements (tetrastoicheia: fire, air, water, earth). Here salt may be seen to replace arsenic due to its more integral relationship to sulphur and mercury in the form of cinnabar (mercuric sulphide, HgS): the salt of mercury and sulphur.
The distinct relation of salt to the body and the elements probably accounts for the cross-like sign it takes in the Greek manuscripts. These forces are necessary to the establishment of creation rather than creation per se. The process not the creation, the flow not the fixed.
Alchemy is not only about the transmutation of metals, but the shift in consciousness that returns us from the physical to the non-physical.
Throughout its history, alchemy has shown a dual nature. On the one hand, it has involved the use of chemical substances and so is claimed by the history of science as the precursor of modern chemistry. Yet at the same time, alchemy has, throughout its history, also been associated with the esoteric, spiritual beliefs of Hermeticism and thus is a proper subject for the historian of religious thought. Such an approach is complemented by the psychological studies of Carl Jung, which correlate alchemical symbolism with the development of the psycho-religious life of the individual.
Alchemy was practiced in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Persia, India, Japan, Korea and China, in Classical Greece and Rome, in the Muslim civilizations, and then in Europe up to the 19th century in a complex network of schools and philosophical systems spanning at least 4500 years.
In the history of science, alchemy refers to both an early form of the investigation of nature and an early philosophical and spiritual discipline, both combining elements of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, medicine, astrology, semiotics, mysticism, spiritualism, and art all as parts of one greater force.
Alchemy is an ancient path of spiritual purification and transformation; the expansion of consciousness and the development of insight and intuition through images
Alchemy was preceded by religion, medicine, and metallurgy. The first chemists were metallurgists. The miner and metallurgist, like the agriculturalist, simply accelerated the process, the natural maturation of the fruits of the earth, in a magico-religious relationship with nature. In primitive societies the miners and metallurgist were members of occult religious society.
The first ventures into natural philosophy, the beginnings of what is called the scientific view, also preceded alchemy. Systems of five almost identical basic elements were postulated in China, India, and Greece, according to a view in which nature comprised antagonistic, opposite forces--hot and cold, positive and negative, and male and female; i.e., primitive versions of the modern conception of energy.
Scholars generally agree that alchemy had everything to do with chemistry, but the modern Hermetic holds that chemistry was the handmaiden of alchemy, not the reverse. From this point of view the development of modern chemistry involved the abandonment of the true goal of the art.
In every philosophy as well as every spiritual tradition, we talk about basic elements that are material and energetic. Since we know that every manifested thing is a trinity of matter, energy, and Consciousness, then we understand that the basic elements are also elements of Consciousness, not just matter and energy.
The four primary elements - air, fire, water, earth - make up everything that we are, or is, on every level. The fifth element, literally “the quintessence,” relates to the ether. In Sanskrit terms, we can also say that it is Kundalini.
It is the Prakriti, the root energy that in some religions is symbolized as the feminine, the Divine Mother. The Divine Mother is that creative force or intelligence in nature and our consciousness that gives life to everything. If we want a healthy spiritual life, we need to know our Divine Mother. Her active agent is the quintessence, which is an energy in all of us. We need that energy to be active. In us, it starts as passive, latent, what in science we call "static, non-kinetic energy.
Worth noting that, “The water element of the ancient philosophers has been metamorphosed into the hydrogen of modern science; the air has become oxygen; the fire, nitrogen; the earth, carbon.” - Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
The Trinity, that is to say the Three Principles, is the basis of all reasoning, and this is why in the whole “series of genesis” it is necessary to have all [three] to establish the foundational Triad that will be[come] the particular Triad. The Three Principals include first an abstract or nourishing datum, second a datum of measure, rhythmisation and fixation, and finally, the third a datum which is concrete or fixed like a seed. This is what the hermetic philosophers have transcribed, concretely and symbolically, by Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, playing on the metallic appearance in which metallic Mercury plays the role of nutritive substance, Sulphur the coagulant of this Mercury, and Salt the fixed product of this function.
In general, everything in nature, being a formed Species, will be a Salt.
Everything that coagulates what is a nourishing substance will be Sulphur or of the nature of Sulphur. Everything that is coagulable will be Mercury, whatever its form.
The image of coagulation with Sulphur as the coagulating agent, Mercury as the coagulated substance, and Salt as the resulting form is used repeatedly by the true Alchemist Mineralogist, Metalurgist, Numerologist, Philosopher, etc. This motif is also the embryological process.
Among the various perspectives that have been surveyed on the nature and the principles inherent to salt, it is the Pythagorean statement that I turn to, which says that ‘salt is born from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’. This pertains most directly to the deeper meaning of Schwaller’s and my hermetic phenomenology. Salt is placed in a septennial relationship comprising of the tria prima and the four elements.
Eberly and Haage inform us that it was Abu Bakr Muhammad Zakariyya Ar-Razi who added the third principle of salt to the primordial alchemical principles (sulphur and mercury) inherited from Greek antiquity (implicit in the exhalation theory of metallogenesis), and already existing in Jabir’s system. This and related traditions must be recognised as clear precursors to Paracelsus’s conception of the tria prima.
Elementally, salt is situated at the end of a progression beginning with fire and air and ending in water and earth. Fire and air form a triad with sulphur; air and water form a triad with mercury; water and earth form a triad with salt. Salt at the end of this progression offers a new beginning, (Life in Death) or to a new fire/sulphur, as the octave recapitulates the primordial tonos in musical harmony.
For Schwaller, it was precisely this ‘juncture of abstract and concrete’ (fire and earth) that was identified with the formation of the philosopher’s stone, the Kyprios).
Salt is an element of substance and physicality. It starts out as coarse and impure. Through alchemical processes, salt is broken down by dissolving, it's purified and eventually reformed into pure salt, the result of the interactions between mercury and sulfur.
In the identification of both sulphur and salt as seed' (semence), one discerns a specific coherence of opposites that, in elemental terms, is described by the expression ‘Fire of the Earth’. The salt is always described as a seed (semence). This seed “becomes” seed again through the organic process of tree and fruit (growth, ferment, coagulation). It is at once a beginning and a finality (prima and ultima materia). The reality described is non-dual.
Beginning and end partake of something that is not describable by an exclusively linear causality and yet it is seen to “grow” or “develop” along a definite “line” or “path” of cause and effect, at the same time it partakes of a cyclic or self-returning character; and for Schwaller, it is the spherical spiral that provides the true image of its reality: The fixed, concrete seed-form (itself a coagulation of mercury by sulphur) contains the active sulphuric functions (the coagulating rhythms) which it will impose upon the nutritive mercurial substance (unformed matter). ‘One nature’, as a Graeco-Egyptian alchemical formula puts it, ‘acts upon itself’.
The alternate cycle of Ouroboros and in the case of cycle of Aphrodite, we have the circle vertically divided, to represent alternate still points, as 'life in death' and 'death in life' her solstices. This should clearly show that the esoteric etymology of Aphrodite as a pentagram, or an Alfa-tetragramaton is A-BR-DT. BR a consonant cluster acting upon itself designating 'life in death and DT a consonant cluster designating 'death in life'.
SALT AND THE FIRE OF THE EARTH
On the nature and the principles inherent to salt, it is the Pythagorean statement -‘salt is born from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’, I want to focus on.
The key to the formation of the philosopher’s stone 'salt'.
In this configuration below one can see the hermetic “problem” of salt, i.e. its mysterium. Salt partakes of something that stands between water and fire (Pythagoras’ ‘purest sources’) in a way that is intimately related to earth, to which it imparts its dryness.
Relationship between Tria Prima and Tetrastoicheia. Trinity (Sulphur-Mercury-Salt) begets quaternary (Fire-Air-Water-Earth). The juncture of Fire and Earth (abstract and concrete) is the means by which the end of the series is linked to its beginning. Diagram after Schwaller and VandenBroeck.
Salt, once isolated, is white and glittering. It is the opposite of wet. You win it by freeing it from water with the help of fire and the sun, and it dries out flesh. Eating salt causes thirst.
Thus, inherent to salt is an equal participation in fire, sulphur and heat (+) and water, mercury, and wetness (–), such that it may be analogised with a chemical neutralisation reaction in which the positive and negative values become electrically equalised. This neutral condition is for Schwaller the very ground of being in which we are existentially and phenomenologically situated (‘everything in nature, being a formed Species, will be Salt’). Thus, to see existence—reality as we know it—as a neutralisation reaction between an active sulphuric function (divinity, logos, eidos) and passive mercurial substance (prima materia), to perceive the coagulating sulphur and the nourishing mercury through the “cinnabar” of all things, this is to “find” the philosopher’s stone. It is fundamentally, for Schwaller, a metaphysics of perception.
Comments